Artists and Designers Are Your Future CEOs

John Maeda Speaks at Creative Mornings Session

In TheStar.com’s 2010 article “CEOs Must Be Artists?”, McGill University Professor and artist Nancy Adler spoke of “a tradition of hostility between the arts and commerce,” in which “artists, too often, think of businesspeople as Philistines, and [businesspeople], in turn, think of artists as a bit flaky.”

Last Friday at the monthly breakfast lecture series “Creative Mornings,” guest speaker and current President of RISD (Rhode Island School of Design), John Maeda, endeavored to explain to his audience that, not only can artists and designers make great leaders/CEOs, but that the business world in general could benefit immensely from using the same techniques and mindset with which artists and designers approach their work.

Maeda described one of these approaches as “taking leaps.” Employing a pyramid visual taken from Dr. Patricia Brennan of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s work, Maeda argued that your archetypal businessperson in a role of leadership is stuck on the lower two rungs of the pyramid, where all decision-making is constrained by reality. Artists and designers, he argues, move beyond that realm into higher plane of problem solving which involves creativity, and finally “boundless creativity,” or, imagination. As artists and designers, we are constantly striving to create a solution that is unique to the world. As Adler puts it: “You’d be hard pressed to find a painter who didn’t approach a blank canvas wanting to produce something of high quality, but all too often people in the commercial world end up settling for the just-good-enough.”

Maeda’s bottom line? It is time that art and design stopped being thought of as “optional” but as a viable and essential part of the future of American education and business.

Susannah Hainley is a graphic designer for Red Rooster Group, a New York based graphic design firm that creates effective brands, websites and marketing campaigns for nonprofits to increase their visibility, fundraising and communications effectiveness. Contact us at info@redroostergroup.com.

ART WATCH: Second Look

This large upside-down image of the Mona Lisa holds some surprises. Modern viewers will have no trouble recognizing the iconic image, though pixelated as it is. We have been accustomed to seeing this famous painting altered, satirized and otherwise copied in so many ways that even the cliché has become banal.

However, this interpretation deserves another look. In fact, it requires one. Upon close inspection, the work of art is comprised of thousands of spools of colored thread carefully arranged to form the image. But to fully appreciate this piece, you need to view it through the glass globe stationed 10 feet in front of the work. Viewed through the sphere, the upside-down the work is both righted and sharpened into focus.

As if that weren’t clever enough, the artist portrays the image with a tourist’s hand holding a camera obscuring Mona Lisa’s face to show how most viewers would actually experience the world’s most famous work of art in person.

WAKE UP CALL: This piece holds lessons for us in giving new perspective and context in which to re-examine the familiar, subverting cultural clichés, and in the repurposing of materials in imaginative ways.

SOURCE: This piece is part of the exhibit titled Second Lives, on display at the Museum of Art and Design in Manhattan, running through April 19, 2009. The exhibit showcases artists who have breathed new life into mundane items such as buttons, beer bottle caps, plastic spoons, and discarded magazines – turning these utilitarian objects into works of great beauty or contemplation.

IDEAS: Valuing Intellectual Capital

Why don’t nonprofits value intellectual capital, particularly marketing expertise, when it can prove crucial to the success of their cause? I encountered that question when I learned about a nonprofit organization that was planning a campaign to raise $300,000 for food pantries and safety net social services, as well as to engage the community in volunteering on a regular basis.Continue reading

Smart Models Conference

AIGA’s Smart Models Conference Provides Lessons for Nonprofits
Drew Hodges from Spot Design opens the AIGA conference on Smart Business Models by describing how his agency transformed from a design studio creating a posters for Broadway shows, most notably, RENT, into an ad agency to capture the  hundreds of thousands of dollars in media commissions. This is a good lesson in making the necessary changes in your organization in order to take advantage of opportunity.

Athletica 3

Matt Owens discusses how he works collaboratively on projects with other young designers under the name Athletica. By sharing an office, they reduce their overhead, and by approaching clients as experts in various areas they are able to attract business that they could not independently. Nonprofits can learn from this approach to collaboration.
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Douglas Riccardi, from Memo Productions, a protege of Tibor Kalman, the legendary designer from M&Co., describes his journey to attract respectable clients and produce outstanding work. Keeping his business small while tackling large projects, he found that his personality was was his key selling point. In the face of daily mediocrity, he urged designers to “push to do something fantastic.” A good lesson in that your recognition comes from doing great things that get noticed, not in doing good or mediocre things consistently. Nonprofits that seek wider visibility from the public and funders need to things dramatically in order to get noticed.
Joe Duffy & Eric Block
Joe Duffy and Eric Block describe their latest venture, Duffy Partners – essentially, the relaunching of Duffy Design before it was swallowed up by the advertising conglomerate. Nonprofits can learn from this process of building up, selling or merging the entity, and starting again.
WAKE UP CALL: New ways of conducting business, serving people and fundraising, are being developed in response to technologies that shrink the world and allow people the interact in different ways. Smart organizations conduct periodic reviews of their missions and their business models to assess whether they are still relevant. When is the last time your organization checked the relevancy of its method of achieving its mission?